So Much TV --Well, It’s Just Sick

Having recently returned to work after two weeks of battle with an “X-Files” strain of virus, I have had time to reflect on my world. My world, according to TV, that is.

And a shrunken world it is when you are sick in bed and a container of Chef Boy-ar-dee in the microwave seems ambitious.

Maybe it was a Robitussin-induced haze that left me viewing the “Beverly Hillbillies” as something to plan my day around.

Feeling able to do something besides sleep by the sixth day, I push into a reclined position for the first of my many shows. Already I’m thinking that one of those holsters seen on the side of a Barcalounger is what I need for my remotes.

The highlights:

10 a.m.: “I Love Lucy” doubleheader. Unbeknownst to Ricky, Lucy joins a ballet company performing at his club, at one point riding piggyback on another dancer. Cough syrup clouds memories of the second half-hour.

Noon: Aunt Bee, sporting an oversized flowery bonnet, has arrived to help care for little freckle-faced Opie, who hates her. This is the first episode of “The Andy Griffith Show.” Aiming to win the motherless Opie’s favor, she tries to fish and fails, tries to catch tadpoles and fails, and commits a string of other embarrassments. So Aunt Bee decides she should go home and let Andy the Sheriff of Mayberry find someone else to look after the young Ron Howard. Just before she hoists up into Andy’s old pickup truck, Opie runs out to stop her. Aint Bee! Aint Bee! We can’t let you leave. We need to take care of you ‘cuz you cain’t fish, you cain’t catch tadpoles, you cain’t do anything. They tearfully embrace. Fade out.

I dab my eyes and watch the first of a daylong stream of commercials for dental referral agencies--I had no clue finding a dentist was so difficult as to require professional help. This is followed by ads for “the motorcycle experts” and the caring “slip and fall” lawyers.

Based on these commercials it would appear the target audience is the homeless Hells Angel who has wiped out a Harley or skidded on a banana peel and now needs massive emergency dental plates and a no-interest payment plan. Should any such consumers recover, they will have major career possibilities if they just call the 800 number and enroll in either medical assistant or dental hygienist school.

1 p.m.: Back-to-back “Beverly Hillbillies” episodes. This is the vintage stuff. (It occurs to me that my social life is saved by not having cable, and specifically Nick at Nite).

In the first episode of a multi-part story, Shorty the hotelier from the Clampetts’ mountain town comes to the Beverly Hills mansion. Because the station interrupts the show with a news story--a dull car chase--I don’t know how Shorty became engaged to a dowdy widow in a plaid shirtdress, who is also staying at the Clampett home. But this guy Shorty definitely does not seek marriage. What a flashback to my childhood viewing this show is. Jethro the dumb nephew, Elly May the dumb but bodacious daughter, Granny the smart but cranky mother-in-law whose boots and skirts are now high fashion. And of course, the ce-ment pond.

Would Shorty get hitched, I wondered? And hadn’t I seen this episode twice before?

The cold-remedy commercials seem even more annoying than they do when one is well. Who wants to listen--especially when your own nose is stuffed up--to someone with a stuffed-up nose screech about how they were up all night? And, hey, I’m sure my nose is way more stuffy than these actors’. I vow to check the cough syrup box for side effects, like edginess.

Phew, just about time for “The Lucy Show.”

Based on her age during the “I Love Lucy” years, Lucy Carmichael, now widowed and single, is probably nearing 60 years old. But strangely enough, she has a son in grade school and resembles my 1961 Barbie doll.

Lucy and Ethel, her sidekick neighbor from the “I Love Lucy” era who has managed to lose Fred somewhere, are two single dames with homes of chartreuse and purple who are constantly being set up with dashing, eligible bachelors who want to take them to nightclubs. In this series, Ethel goes by Vivian. She and her current beau fix up Lucy with a dashing, eligible bachelor who is so smitten he wants to take Lucy hunting. She fakes him out and pretends she loves gunning down wildlife. But after bungling all attempts to shoot down a duck, it becomes clear that her real skill is not duck killing but duck calls. Some people are just naturally gifted. I miss the ending due to an unfortunately timed nap.

I fade back in to a psychic-hotline commercial, although it could be astrology forecasts. I appear to be zooming on cold medicine.

2 p.m.: At last, the premiere of the new one-hour drama “Sunset Beach.” Day One with a soap opera named after a beach town five minutes away from my very bed! Waves crash as the show opens with a shot of what suspiciously resembles the Seal Beach Pier. But, OK, this is fiction, right?

So Dorothy from Kansas--I kid you not--stiffs her fiance at the altar after spotting him making out with her maid of honor. Her mother, played by what surely is a highly compensated Mimi Rogers, seems genuinely pleased that her daughter is going to fly cross-country in search of the man she has known only through e-mail as S.B.

Only on that very first day, as she is wandering around the sunny boardwalk, wouldn’t you know it, a runaway steals her backpack. It has her purse, a $1,000 cashier’s check--and her laptop computer, natch. She chases the thief down the pier. But her frock catches on something and when she tries to jerk it loose, she topples off the pier to the briny waves below. Luckily, a blond lifeguard named Casey rescues her.

Like his tan Stepford homeboys at the tower, Casey goes everywhere in red shorts and unzipped jacket baring a ripply torso. I could go on for hours with details of steamy sex between he-she police partners, the oil paintings belonging to S.B. that a straight guy would never hang in his house, the standard-issue crystal liquor decanters found on all soaps. (Observed my boyfriend, also home sick that day: “Sunset Beach” makes “Melrose Place” look like “Masterpiece Theatre.” Is there anything more romantic than two sick people watching bad television together while sucking cough drops and sneezing?)

A commercial for a psychic hotline interrupts all the “Sunset” fun. Customers praise the value of having your future told to you by someone you have never met who might possibly have failed the Bryman School for medical assisting.

These testimonials are given by women who resemble Diahann Carroll circa the “Julia” show, and Donna Reed. In small print floating in a corner of the screen it reads, “dramatization.” Dressed in tailored suits with tasteful pumps and hairdos, the women praise their psychic connections, which only cost $3.99 a minute. Well you know, I think, that would be cheaper than psychotherapy and still leave some extra for a shirtdress and pearl choker.

3 p.m.: The “Rosie O’Donnell” show. A good day to tune in because the guest is the artist formerly known as Prince, and I am a huge fan. It’s enough to keep me from switching to “Bewitched.”

But only temporarily. After The Artist’s performance, I go straight for the Stephens household. With all the large lime green and turquoise prints Samantha wears, I am feeling like I could actually relive the ‘60s having more fun than my first time around, when I was in grade school. Also, there are those commercials for three-record sets of greatest hits . . .

Aunt Clara has popped in, landing in the refrigerator--her witchcraft skills a bit rusty. It seems Aunt Clara’s friend, lord of a castle somewhere on the British Isles, has been harassed by a noisy ghost who resembles Yosemite Sam in a smoking jacket. Samantha is needed. As very bad luck would have it, Darrin’s nosy mother and oblivious father are vacationing at the very same castle! After many close calls and nose twitches to duck her in-laws, Samantha sweet-talks the ghost into quitting all that racket. With blond flip intact, she still makes it home from the other continent to hostess a dinner party with Darrin’s boss. Don’t you love a happy ending?

The bad news quite literally is that it is now time for the LIVE ACTION EYEWITNESS STORM WATCH CRIME WATCH barrage by the local anchorheads.

Instantly worn out, and disappointed in the ordinary slick quality of commercials, I grasp my TV guide to plan for the next showing of “The Rockford Files,” and drift off to sleep.